


The Stolen Child

by beerecordings



Category: jacksepticeye egos - Fandom
Genre: Anti has trauma, Anti is soft in this but ONLY for JJ haha, Anti is somehow both a terrible and excellent parent at the same time, Graceling Jameson, Jamie is a tiny prince and he is spoiled and loving, Monster Anti, Past Sexual Assault, and Anti never planned to get this attached to the little bastard, child!Jameson, graceling AU, in fact he's still trying to keep him at arm's length, technically a medieval au?, there is nothing graphic in this fic but it does touch on some heavy trauma so please be careful, tw cancer mentions, tw sexual assault mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25702849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beerecordings/pseuds/beerecordings
Summary: Graceling AU - based loosely on Kristin Cashore’s Graceling books, this is a universe where Jameson is a child who’s been raised by  Anti - a powerful Graceling, Monster, and abuse survivor who’s come to believe that everyone is evil and wants to hurt him, except, perhaps, his little brother. The others include Graceling warrior Jackie, the Monster Marvin, their brother Chase, and their cousin Henrik, a healer.Anti is the terror of his enemies, a violent assassin who had become accustomed to being alone and trusting no one. As a Monster - a mutated human with colorful hair and the curse of being wanted by most everyone who looks at him - Anti has learned that people will hurt him if they get the chance. He sustains himself on thoughts of vengeance against everyone who ever laid their hands on him, plotting his rise to power with the help of his deadly Grace of persuasion. And if that plotting involves the kidnapping of his half-brother, then fine - it's not like he's going to get attached to the six-year-old prince who loves him with everything he has.
Relationships: Anti & Jameson Jackson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	1. One

He had stolen the child fair and square, and in doing so, accepted all responsibility for his health and well-being.  
It had taken him weeks to earn Jameson’s trust, but this was no matter. Perhaps, in fact, it was a process for both of them, because Anti, for all that he planned to protect him until the pair of them were ready to assume his throne, had little interest in the child. He had little interest in anyone. People were violent and self-interested and they would hurt him if they knew what he was. They would hurt him just for the fun of it. And Jameson – Jameson, young as he was, was just a seedling of something that would grow to desire to hurt him less he culled the instinct in him like a feral dog taught not to bite its owner.  
He did not plan to grow attached. He still does not allow himself to admit it. The prince sleeps in his bedroom for his own protection, because he trusts no one else to protect him and people are cruel to children too. The prince is allowed to sit beside him or on his lap as he works because he is learning what he must do and become, not because Anti has any affection for him. The way he strokes his hair sometimes, the way he might allow the child to wrap his little arms around his throat after nightmares or tripping in the hallway, the sound of Jameson’s voice whispering, “Anti? I love you,” well – these are all just childish things, and Anti does not mimic them. He doesn’t. He doesn’t. Not often.  
“I love you, your highness.”  
These are unspoken words. There are many things unspoken between them. The warmth of his fragile little ribs and the need to protect him. The way seeing him smile contents something buried deep inside Anti, something young and vulnerable all on its own. These things are just… coincidences. Side effects. He doesn’t love the child and he isn’t attached.  
But he did take on responsibility for his health, and so, when the prince begins rejecting his food, Anti is concerned.  
“He doesn’t like it,” he tells one of the serving girls, his eyes narrowed dangerously at her even though she’s turned obediently away from him, her face to the wall as she waits for any orders. “Get him something else to eat.”  
Jameson makes a little groan and throws his fork down on top of his fish, sulking back against his chair and kicking his feet against the table. Anti watches him with an almost amused grace, perhaps even a fondness. Alright, he might not love the child exactly, but he has to admit he has a certain enjoyment for the stubborn little prince, like one entertains the angers of a bad-tempered puppy.  
“What’s wrong, your highness?” asks Anti, his mismatched eyes demanding the attention of Jameson’s own. Blue and green, blue and silver. He reaches over to steal Jameson’s plate, putting a piece of fish in his mouth just to incite him to appetite. “Not growing spoiled on me, are you?”  
“My throat hurts, Anti,” Jameson complains in an angry little whimper, kicking the table harder.  
“Mmh,” says Anti. “Might have caught a cold. I should have known better than to take you into the city. This country is fucking filthy.”  
“Anti,” hisses Jameson, eyes wide with alarm. “That’s a bad word!”  
Anti smiles at him, a little laughter bubbling out of his throat. “My apologies, your highness. I don’t wish to offend your delicate sensibilities.”  
“You’re making fun of me again.”  
“Maybe just a little.”  
Jameson gets up and runs over to punch him in the arm. Anti smiles down at him and reaches out to take his little fist.  
“Take your thumb out from under your fingers,” he instructs him. “Else you break it when you strike. Do you want to break your thumb, your highness?”  
“No.”  
“Hit me again, then. Hard.”  
Jameson pauses, staring up at Anti’s face, scanning it for tricks or deception, but he has never known Anti to lie or even much to joke. He sets his little mouth in a scowl and punches Anti’s arm again, grunting with the effort of it. Anti does not flinch.  
“Better,” he says. “You’ll get stronger. But for now you are small and weak, so next time you must hit someone twice your size, you will claw your hands like this and reach for the face when they try to pick you up.”  
He lifts Jameson up for demonstration and takes his hand, curling it into a mean little claw and guiding it towards his eyes. “Pluck out the eyes or tear open the nostrils and mouth. See how I have let your little nails grow out, your highness? If it is a man, you strike him between the legs. If you need to hurt someone, decorum no longer matters. You scream and thrash and draw blood from their faces. You draw your little knife on them and scar them for the rest of their lives. And then, before they can hurt you, I will come to protect you. Do you understand?”  
Distracted from his irritation by the intensity of his speech, Jameson pats the knife strapped to his side and nods, squirming a little in Anti’s arms. He makes to set him down, but Jamie kicks his determined little legs and swings them over his lap, scooting onto his legs and settling down against his warm chest, humming. Anti snorts, but doesn’t throw him off. The child smells like the lily fragrance his clothes are washed in and he has a small, sweet voice for humming and singing. It runs in the family. Anti knows. He strokes the child’s hair, just once.  
There’s the ringing of a bell as food appears in the cracked space beneath a covered window connecting the hall to the kitchen. Anti stiffens, wrapping an arm around Jameson’s belly as the serving girl goes to fetch his replacement dinner. He prefers to have their dinner ready for them at six every evening precisely, so the cooks and servants are gone into the kitchen or their quarters except the one turned towards the wall, and he and Jameson can take their places without anyone looking at them. They never have guests and rarely call on the serving girl. But she knows the rules. She’d best know the rules.  
Her eyes closed, having memorized the placement of the room months ago, she takes the plate and moves over to the table, patiently clearing a space before her to set it down.  
Anti watches her eyes the whole time, his heart snarling and racing in his chest. If she looks – if she blinks open her eyes for even a moment – if he catches the slightest flash of the whites of her eyes – he will bury his blade in the middle of her belly before she can so much as gasp at the sight of him.  
On his lap, Jameson plays with his little knife, watching her eyes too. No one is allowed to see Anti. He doesn’t understand exactly why, just yet, but it doesn’t matter. All he knows is that anyone else seeing Anti is bad, and he doesn’t want them to get hurt either. He is learning, better and better every day, his guardian’s wariness.  
The girl’s eyes do not flicker. She leaves the plate and goes to return to her post by the kitchen window, turning her back to the wall.  
Anti sighs and draws the plate towards them, feeling his blood calm again as Jameson snuggles back down on his lap. The second dinner has lamb and potatoes and, as an added treat for a fussy prince, sweet buns with rabbits in icing on top.  
“Anti?” says Jameson in his clear young voice. He thinks it will sound pretentious when he’s an adult, but for now he’s just a cute posh kid from the most northern kingdom in the continent, the neighbor to Anti’s homeland.  
“Yes, your highness.”  
“If someone ever looks at you, do I use my knife then too?”  
Anti blinks, surprised by how the idea affects him. Jameson is only a child, it is true, but someday he will be a man, as swift and as terrible in his bloodshed as Anti, and a promise to kill on his behalf will be powerful.  
No one else has ever helped him hide himself.  
Then again, once he is a man, he will no longer have the innocence of a child, and he will want to look at Anti the same way everyone else looks at him, the same way even his sister and uncle looked at him, so maybe it doesn’t matter.  
“Yes,” he says, sighing. “It will be good practice for you anyway, for you will not survive in this world if you are not ready to shed a little blood.”  
Jameson nods slowly, reaching up to touch Anti’s beard. He flinches, just once, and Jamie’s hands pause.  
But he’s as curious a child as he is ferocious. Or maybe affectionate is the right word, and Anti just doesn’t want to admit that Jameson is given to a certain kind of warmth he himself has long since lost. A certain kind of warmth he knows he must train out of him someday.  
One way or another, Jameson puts his fingers in the soft tangle of his dark beard and begins rubbing the scratchy hair against his fingerprints as though memorizing the sensation. Eventually, his long nails begin to scrape against his cheeks, and for all that Anti feels that he’s being scratched like a cat, he can’t deny that it feels nice.  
Maybe he even lets his head come down to rest against Jameson’s for a moment, and they sit together in the quiet as the birds sing through the open, sheet-covered windows, a warm summer breeze moving through and across and between them.  
“Anti?” says Jameson. “I love you.”  
Anti touches the small of his back and feels his little heartbeat soothing against his fingers.  
“Come,” he says, pulling the plate down onto their shared lap. “Even with a cold, little princes must eat. Look, your favorite rolls.”  
He holds a bun up to Jameson’s mouth and the prince takes an obedient bite, but as soon as he swallows, his body tenses up again and he begins to cry, clinging to Anti’s shirt.  
“My throat hurts!” he complains, coughing around the food in his throat. “Anti, Anti!”  
“Come now, your highness, just a little. Take some water – there you are – and now just a few more bites, alright? Let’s just get a little food in you or you will feel even worse, I promise.”  
“No, no!”  
“Your highness…”  
“It hurts! It hurts!” He kicks against the table, harder than he did before, bicycling his feet against the wood, slam slam slam, until the water pitcher goes crashing off the table.  
“Do you want to lose your books before bed? Four bites, alright? Four bites. Come now.”  
But Jameson won’t even get through two. Anti stops pressing the roll to his lips when he hears his voice change from embittered child tantrum to real pain, swinging him around in his lap to face Jameson towards him and feeling his forehead and tonsils. There is no fever and no swelling, but he knows, by now, the difference between Jameson taking a tumble and wanting to be comforted and Jameson taking a tumble and screaming for pain. He scoops the child up, examining his face, scrunched up with hurt and crying, and sets him on his hip as he takes him back to their bedroom. It’ll have to be an early bedtime. He’ll dismiss nanny and read him to sleep himself. Tomorrow, he’ll send for a doctor, just in case.  
“I’ve got you, your highness,” he promises, bouncing him as he walks. “There’s no reason to cry. I won’t let any harm come to you.”  
Before he leaves the dining hall, he rings the bell on the far wall and closes the door behind him, so the serving girl knows it is safe, at last, to open her eyes.


	2. Two

Anti’s bed is a sacred place for him, the epicenter of a room secured in every way he and the quarter-dozen consultants whom he subsequently killed could think of. There are five bedrooms on the floor and each one is just the same, though he only sleeps in one, so no one would know which one to break into. The door is made of a single slab of wood so thick and heavy an elephant could not move it, and the six locks on it would take three men with a crowbar to pry off one by one. He carries the keys on a necklace against his breast and never takes them off. The windows are covered and bolted and reinforced and barbed and meshed. One day he plans to have them replaced with stone entirely, and he and Jameson will light candles no one else can see.  
No one can reach his bedroom. No one can reach his bed. No one can reach him. He has had enough of hands touching him while he sleeps, of waking up to a warm body on top of his own, to the sound of someone breathing beside him and the feeling of hands around his stomach drifting lower, lower –  
He’s a light sleeper these days. He’s a very light sleeper.  
Jameson’s bed is against the wall across the room, a little mahogany wood frame with ponies carved into the head and back board. Late at night, he sometimes hears Jameson running his fingers along the patterns and making “clip clop, clip clop” or huffing noises to himself like Bertrand, which is what he named his real pony, playing imaginary games until he drifts off to sleep. But tonight, the only noises coming from his side of the room are the soft fluttering of his blankets as he shifts again and again and fragile, shaky coughs. Disturbed by the noise for more reasons than one, Anti drifts in and out of flimsy nightmares and dreams, occasionally finding himself sitting up to watch the child as the moon does its valiant best to shine cold light through the blue-covered window. He thinks Jameson is sleeping, but just as badly as he is.  
He’s finally managed to doze off late into the night, his tired body taking him down deeper than usual, blocking all dreams off and leaving him in peaceful loneliness. He only half-wakes at the sound of soft crying, his eyes closed against his pillows and his limbs askew beneath his warm blankets.  
“Anti,” sobs the child. “Anti, hurts, hurts.”  
Anti tries to command himself to wake, but his sluggish limbs only flop over in bed and he hears himself sigh, trying to get up, too cozy beneath his covers. He mumbles something even he doesn’t understand.  
More shuffling from the boy’s bed. The sound of his pale feet striking the cold wood of the floor. And then –  
Anti jolts back with a cry, nearly tumbling out of bed. Jameson looks up at him, confused, still dragging himself up onto the bed, his face red and trembling.  
“I want to sleep with you,” he cries, reaching out his hands.  
Anti’s heart is still a-tremble in his chest, his breaths coming in ragged gasps. They’re both lucky his hands are so small, or Anti might have shattered his wrist the moment he felt the hand come down on the sheets beside him.  
“Your highness,” he barks, his face flushed white. “You never sneak up on me again, do you understand?”  
Jameson whimpers and then crumples onto the bed holding his knees to his chest, only crying harder.  
“I could have hurt you.”  
Jameson reaches out his hands again, clutching and unclutching his fists, wailing.  
Anti swears under his breath and tries to breathe in deep. Alright, everything’s fine. It’s just Jameson. He digs his nails into his thigh, furious with himself.  
Scared of a six-year-old, Anti? Scared of a child?  
No! He’s not scared. He’ll prove it.  
“Come here, don’t cry.”  
He pulls Jameson to his side and immediately he has a snuggly pile of a prince pressing up against his ribs and curling beneath his arms. Jameson begins coughing again and clutches at his shirt, crying weakly. He must be exhausted, and hungry too. Anti strokes his hair and puts an arm around him.  
“What’s wrong, your highness? Still your cold?”  
“My throat, my throat!” cries Jameson, his voice gone raw and rasping. “It really hurts, Anti, it really hurts.”  
“Poor thing. Sh, sh. I’ve got you.”  
“Make it stop, Anti, please, please?”  
“The doctor will be here first thing in the morning and you can spend all day being fussed over by nanny. I’ll get you all your stuffies and puppets and tuck you into bed and we’ll make crushed up strawberries with ice to make your throat feel all better. How does that sound?”  
Jameson cries and shakes his head and rubs his running nose into Anti’s shirt.  
“Well, how about some water, okay? Here, come here.” He pulls him onto his lap and sits up with him, taking a pitcher of water from beside the bed and pouring him a cup. Jameson takes the glass into his small hands and chugs until Anti has to stop him from drizzling water all down his chin. He’s panting by the time he stops, a little calmed from his crying, sniffling and rubbing at his tired, aching eyes.  
Anti lies down and Jameson makes no attempts to roll off of him, settling down right there on his chest. Anti takes a deep breath and allows it. He can manage it. He weighs much less than anyone who’s ever tried to lay him down before, and he’s so warm, like a hot water bottle wrapped around his stomach. He tugs Jameson a little higher on his body and lets the child burrow against his scarred throat, going quiet at the feeling of his fingers tracing over the scraggly pattern of it. He can hear Jameson coughing and snuffling in his ear and feel him shifting on his stomach.  
Tentatively, he wraps his arms around him, and Jameson settles a little more, his fingers rising to scratch at his beard again.  
For a moment, Anti almost wants to sing for him, and he doesn’t know why. He has memories of lullabies, but the years soured them so badly.  
Why didn’t anybody ever protect him like this?   
He sighs and rubs Jameson’s back slowly, feeling the boy turn to look at him with his big, loving eyes. He blushes and can’t manage to look back at him. One day, this child will see him for what he is, and he, like everybody else, will want him for his own. That’s the way of the world. He can’t change it.  
There’s no point in getting attached. He isn’t. He isn’t.  
“Anti,” says Jameson dreamily, broken by a slight cough. “Your hair’s so pretty.”  
Adrenaline burns through Anti’s blood and he feels a little gasp fall out of his mouth, his grip tightening around Jameson’s back. Jameson just snuggles closer to his chin and reaches his little fingers up, and then there are hands in Anti’s hair, hands in Anti’s hair, hands that could drag him, move him, tear at him, a mouth close to whisper how lovely he looks, how lovely his hair is, green as emerald, with eyes like jewels, beautiful young lord, hands in his hair shoving him to his knees –  
“I love you, Anti,” says Jameson. “Your hair’s so pretty.”  
“Stop,” he gasps, eyes fixated on the ceiling, nausea storming in his stomach. “Jameson, stop!”  
A pause in child’s hands. The fingers draw slowly away and the little body rolls off him.  
Anti sucks in a deep breath, his hand on his chest. For a moment, all he can do is shudder, his eyes trapped on the stone of the ceiling, his palm spread out to feel the galloping rhythm of his heart.  
He sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, cold blue in the light through the window.  
Jameson has stopped crying. He mimics Anti, throwing his legs over the other side of the bed and staring at the ground.  
“What… what did I do bad?” asks Jameson, and Anti recognizes the tremble in his voice.  
He supposes they both have their triggers.  
“Don’t touch my hair!” He manages to stop himself from shouting, but he can’t keep the order away. “Do you understand?”  
“I understand.”  
So small and resigned. Anti covers his face. He knows he needs to comfort him, but he can’t bring himself to move. He shivers in the cold and tries to turn to look at him.  
Jameson is crawling forward to kneel behind him, his little sleep shirt hanging off his shoulders, his eyes still red. And then, before Anti can say anything more, before he can even decide what it is he needs to say, Jameson is wrapping his hands around him and burying himself back in his shoulder again.  
Anti sighs very deep, closing his eyes. He never meant to raise this child. That was never the plan. He just wanted to keep him safe until he was ready. No, not even that, he just wanted… he just wanted…  
He doesn’t know. Someone. He didn’t even think about how Jameson wouldn’t look at him the way most people do, but now – it’s so strange. He doesn’t think anyone in his life has ever told him his hair was beautiful without wanting to use him for it.  
Truths like these are dark, and it casts a shadow over his heart for a second, but not for long. He sets his face and sits up again.  
Being what he is allowed him to become aware of truths like these. And they are truths. He knows they must be. He knows how people treat him, just because he’s a Monster, so beautiful that even strong people have left spouses in the pursuit of him or violated what they once called moral absolutes to touch his flesh and speak into his ear as he trembled. He never asked to be treated the way he’s been treated.  
But he has. And so he knows what other people refuse to see – that human beings are cruel and hateful, that they will use you and torment you, that love is an idiot’s concept, that life is meaningless and you should just try and enjoy what you can and get revenge on the things that hurt you.  
For this moment, he tries to enjoy that Jameson is here and that, for a few more years, the child is only a child, and loves him in whatever way love does exist, as best he can.  
“I’m sorry,” says Jameson. “Please don’t hurt me.”  
“Have I ever?” whispers back Anti, touching the little hand over his heart.  
Jameson shakes his head. “No. But… sometimes… I still get scared you will.”  
“That’s how I feel when you touch my hair,” says Anti. “Sometimes we know that there are people who won’t hurt us, but when they do things that have hurt us in the past, it’s still scary. That doesn’t mean either of us were wrong. We just need to not do the scary things anymore if we can help it, okay?”  
“So I can’t touch your hair?”  
“Probably not. Maybe, if you asked. You can touch my beard. That was okay.”  
Jameson digs his fingers into his beard again, coughing a little. “But it is so pretty, though, Anti,” he says shyly, hiding in his shoulder, and Anti wonders with a sudden shudder just how early some form of attraction for him begins. Is he enchanting Jameson without even meaning to, not sexually but aesthetically? Is that the only reason the child is attached to him? Is he only ever a Monster, even to the people he chooses? Even to children?  
It’s been so long since he’s felt the need to cry, but his eyes are burning.  
“I like it,” says Jameson, looking at it, and Anti is sure, for a moment, that he will touch it again, that he is too small and too young to resist the slightest temptation, that he’s allured by him like everyone else is, that he will dig his little fingers into his hair and yank –  
But no. Jameson stares warmly up at his face and does not touch his hair again.  
“Am I going to look like you when I grow up, Anti?”  
Anti cups his perfect little face, overwhelmed, painfully so, by the fondness he feels for him. It’s not fair and he knows that. None of life has ever been fair. But he wishes there were some things he could keep, like a six-year-old Jameson, too young to be attracted to him, too strong to touch his hair no matter how pretty it is.  
“No,” whispers Anti. “Thank God that you will not.”  
Jameson’s face falls. He coughs again, shivering a little and touching his aching throat. “But you’re so pretty, Anti. Aren’t my eyes like yours?”  
“You’re a Graceling,” says Anti, touching one of his eyebrows. “So you will have a little power like I do, and your eyes will always be mismatched. But you won’t be like me in most ways. You will be a handsome young man, your highness, but you don’t have to look like this and that’s a good thing.”  
“I want green hair,” protests Jameson, punching his arm once, furrowing his brow. “Why can’t I?”  
“It’s brown,” chuckles Anti. “What do you want me to do, paint it?”  
“Yes! Let’s paint it!”  
“Your highness,” laughs Anti, pulling him up on his shoulder. Jameson coughs against his shirt, letting himself be pulled. “Poor thing, that was a deep cough, deep in your little chest. I’ve got you.”  
Jameson looks up at him but can’t stop coughing, putting his head down against his shoulder miserably and no doubt spewing his little kid germs right into Anti’s face. Anti strokes his downy hair and soothes his back, waiting for him to be able to rest again.  
But Jameson does not stop coughing.  
“Your highness?”  
Jameson bends over his shoulder, retching.  
“Jameson!”  
“My throat hurts!” he screams between desperate gasps at air. “My throat hurts! My mouth tastes bad!”  
“Come here, honey, come here.” Anti sweeps him into his arms and pulls him to his chest, patting his back as he lifts him to his feet and bounces him around the room. “Sh, sh, breathe deep. Breathe, your highness, please.”  
Jameson spits something hot and wet onto Anti’s shoulder. The smell of copper rises in his nose.  
“Shit,” swears Anti, almost choking on his own air. “No, no, no. Jamie?”  
Blood is welling in Jameson’s mouth and spilling out onto his chin as he cries.  
Anti has never – not once in all the time he has lived here – unlocked the door to this room during the night until now.  
“Christine!” he screams down the stairs, clutching his prince to his chest. “Go fetch the doctor, now!”


	3. Three

“Poor little lad, poor little thing.”  
He can hear Imelda fussing over him from the hallway. What he wants to hear is the doctor say something, say anything, not just keep asking his stupid questions. He’s supposed to have a Grace for diagnosis, so why is it taking so fucking long? Anti growls and pulls his hood down farther over his mask. He can hear Jameson sobbing.  
“How long has this been going on?”  
“I don’t know. I woke up to him coughing and then there was blood in his mouth.”  
At least Imelda knows to be discreet about him. She’s been Jameson’s nanny ever since Anti stole him away and she’s never once questioned their secrecy. Anti’s even shown his face around her. She is, of course, completely blind, but he still considers it a mark of trust.  
“Does your chest hurt, child?”  
“No, my throat!”  
“His lungs are clear. It’s not consumption.”  
Anti sinks to the floor, gasping with relief. Tuberculosis would be deadly at Jameson’s age. Thank God.  
“It seems the blood is coming from his throat.”  
What could possibly cause that? An injury? He must have swallowed something.  
“Alright, hold still for me. What’s your name?”  
“None of your business!”  
Anti snorts and covers his mouth. There’s his boy.  
“You can call him JJ,” says Imelda, scolding in her voice. “He’s just a little rude sometimes.”  
“JJ, I’m going to need you to hold still for me while I look at your throat. Can you do that for me?”  
“You’re going to make it hurt worse!”  
“I need to look at it to make it better. I’ll be quick, okay?”  
“Mmh… okay. If you’re quick!”  
“As quick as I can be. Here we go, tilt your head back for me. There we are.”  
A long pause. Anti chews on his nails.  
“Have some water to clear your throat out.”  
Clinking glasses and Jameson drinking.  
“Head back again. Good, you’re doing so good.”  
Anti tugs at the scarf around his mouth, closing his eyes.  
“There doesn’t seem to be anything in the throat. I’m going to pinch around a little, alright, JJ?”  
“Alright.”  
Stupid fucking doctor. Stupid fucking country. One day, he’ll go home and take Jameson with him, and the two of them will run both of their homelands together. He just has to keep him safe til he’s old enough.  
He hears the doctor murmur something he can’t make out.  
“What?” asks Imelda. “What kind?”  
“Come, if you put your fingers here, you can feel…”  
Anti gets back to his feet and paces.  
“But what does this mean?” asks Imelda, and he hates, he hates, he hates how shaken she sounds. “Will it go away?”  
“Not on its own, I don’t believe.”  
“What is it?” asks Jameson, small and confused between them. “What’s… a growth?”  
There is more murmuring between the doctor and Imelda. Anti holds his head in his hands as his world begins to crack into pieces.  
“It will have to be removed,” he hears.  
“Will that be safe?”  
“There are always risks to surgery, but I believe there’s a good chance of recovery.”  
“But will it affect his breathing? His eating? His voice?”  
Small, pattering footsteps approach him, and he turns his head to see Jameson in the light from the hall, reaching out his hands for him, his face contorted with distress. Anti moves without conscious thought to swoop down and pick him up, cradling him to his chest.  
“The growth is in his laryngitis, and there is a strong enough chance that’s it’s cancerous that we have to err on the side of caution.”  
“It’s okay, Anti,” says Jameson, his voice small and sweet and loving, lying his head on his shoulder and curling his fingers through his beard. “Don’t be sad. I’m not coughing now, see? I’m okay, Anti. Anti? I love you.”  
Anti whispers his name and clutches his head to his heart.  
“The entire voice box will have to be removed.”

The doctor with the Grace for diagnosis lives down by the canal, his home attached to his working space, small brown rooms with dark, lovely furniture housing his little family, a wife and two sons.  
Anti, for his part, has not left his keep in days.  
In the playroom, he can hear Jameson sobbing again while nanny tries to feed him yogurt, but his screaming only picks up as she presses the spoon against his mouth. His pain is only getting worse, and terrifyingly rapidly, too. He has not eaten more than a handful of crushed-up blueberries and a glass of milk since his dinner last night.  
“Sh, sh, sh,” hushes Imelda. “Here’s for your hungry stomach, honey, here comes the pony to the gate, open wide… there’s a good boy, there you go.”  
“I don’t like it!”  
“I know, your highness.”  
Anti supposes he’ll have to retire her if Jameson’s voicebox has to go too. And then what will he do? Hire a seeing nanny? Raise him himself?  
No. It doesn’t matter. He won’t need the surgery. He’ll find another way.  
“I want Anti!” sobs Jameson, his voice hoarse and fading. “Make him stop going places! Make him come home! He never plays with me anymore. Tell him I’m sick so he has to.”  
Anti can’t help but laugh to himself, shaking his head as he ties his mask over his eyes, leaving only the blue one showing. The child is learning, and swiftly, too. An intelligent child will make for an intelligent king when Anti is ready for him to be one.  
“Your highness,” he calls down the hall.  
“Anti!”  
His poor, raspy little voice. Anti feels a burst of fury that this happened at all. Something else injuring the child who belongs to him. He won’t allow it.  
“Would you like to come with me on a little errand?”  
He scampers down the hall a moment later holding his little shoes and jumping for his blue cape on the wall. Doesn’t matter how hungry he’s feeling – time spent with Anti is time spent with Anti. And he likes going on errands, Anti’s noticed, watching him race around to pick everything up from the market like he’s playing fetch or allowing him to pick out his own new clothes, holding stubbornly onto Anti’s hand the whole time. Getting treats when noon comes and riding the horse in Anti’s lap or Betrand on his own.  
Anti is teaching him to like the more exciting errands, too. One day the child will have to learn to get what he wants on his own, just like Anti did.  
He draws a bandana over his mouth. Then one over his hair. Then his hood comes up. He coats his throat in a scarf and draws together the strings of his shirt, his cape falling behind him. Gloves fit onto his hands and boots for his feet – JJ darts forward to lace them, showing off his shoe-tying skill. Anti’s pants are black like the rest of the ensemble. His belt hides an array of knives behind him. The only skin to be seen on him is the circle around his right eye. He pauses before a covered mirror, drawing it aside to check that his eyelashes have not grown out far enough to be distracting, and then he breathes deep and pushes his way through the back passage of his keep.  
“Ready to go?” he asks the coughing child who is trotting, determined, at his side.  
“Yes,” rasps Jameson, reaching for his hand.  
Anti helps him onto a horse and they take off down, down the city towards the canal.  
Here, this is the house. He presses inside the door of the small adjoined building, his nerves prickling as he registers that other people are inside. An under-sized teenager looks up at them from behind a table, smiling politely, though her eyes rake down his ensemble with thinly-veiled alarm. He pulls his cape a little closer, hiding the curves of his body.  
“Are you here for the doctor?” she asks.  
He nods.  
“He’s just with a patient if you’re willing to wait.”  
He didn’t even have to charm her. No one questions you when you’ve got a kid as cute as Jameson clinging to you like a life vest and sniffling.  
He will make this right for Jameson. He will make this right for Jameson. He will make this right.  
Jameson is trying to crawl into his lap. Anti sighs and picks him up to set him down in the chair beside him.  
“I thought the contradictory signals of you having me on your lap while threatening to kill a man were amusing to you,” whispers Jameson.  
“That’s only for the men who come to try and rip me off,” answers Anti. “We’re not dealing with criminals right now. You are not here to help me intimidate today. Just learn.”  
“I hate learning,” says Jameson, punching his arm. “You tricked me, this is school!”  
“I’ll get you a strawberry ice afterwards,” Anti promises. “Didn’t you want to protect me anyway?”  
Jameson thinks for a second and then nods, accepting his new role and straightening up at Anti’s side, a tiny bodyguard.  
The door to the back opens and out steps the doctor, saying his goodbyes to a woman with a bandaged hand. He turns to his secretary, who turns to Anti and Jameson, who stare back at him with three different-colored eyes between them.  
“Ah,” he says, his eyes landing on the child. “JJ, hullo.”  
Jameson straightens up coolly, turning his head away when a hand is out-stretched to him. Anti says he does not have to touch peasants if he does not wish to.  
“And you must be his guardian,” adds the doctor, brushing it off and turning to Anti. “His caretaker did say you valued your… privacy.”  
“I needed to meet with you about this procedure you’ve recommended.”  
“Please, come back to an examination room. We can have a little privacy.”  
Jameson snatches Anti’s hand as they follow him back to a room with a mattress on a high table and plenty of chairs. Anti picks Jameson up and sets him on the examination table, where he waits patiently, kicking his legs.  
“I know the news must be upsetting,” says the doctor. “I’m glad we have a chance to discuss it. The procedure can be dangerous, of course, but – ”  
“You will find another way to cure this,” says Anti.  
The doctor huffs out a sigh, adjusting his collar. “It can be difficult to come to terms with something like this, but I am a Graced diagnostician who’s yet to make a mistake in his life when it comes to growths like these. The treatment is not optional, it – ”  
Anti draws back his hood and bandana.  
Hair like a green sea tumbles over his blackened mask, glowing in the light from the high windows.  
“All that is holy,” breathes the doctor, shooting to his feet. “A Monster.”  
Anti hisses out something that might be a laugh, untying the mask around his eyes.  
“Now hold on,” protests the physician, a slight stammer finding his voice as he takes a step towards the exit. Jameson leaps down from the examination table, his tiny boots thudding against the floor, and races to stand in front of the door, crossing his arms across his chest. He is the height of the doctor’s waist and glaring.  
“Come on, sir,” says Anti coyly, stepping towards him, letting the cape fall away from his shoulders. For once, he does not use the pitching, broken voice he usually uses in public to destroy the allure of his voice, and his accent is thick and rolling, lovely, across the ears. “What a cruel thing to call me. I just want to take care of my little child. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you, sir?”  
He’s caught halfway between flight and Anti’s eyes, Anti’s deep and endless eyes, mismatched and clear as refined crystal, shining with the power of his Grace of compulsion. Completed by his Monstrosity, he is a siren, he is irresistible, he is the most powerful creature he’s ever met.  
He never asked for any of it. But that doesn’t matter now. Jameson is what matters now. And when God curses you twice over and condemns you to hell on earth, you use that curse to your benefit whenever you have the chance.  
Pinning the doctor against the wall, Anti pulls off his gloves and strokes his cheek slowly, humming gently. Jameson comes up to clutch at his leg, watching with wide eyes.  
“What’s your name?” asks Anti.  
The brown eyes of the man are fixated on his, but only for a moment. Then they’re drifting down his body and back up again. Anti breathes out. Breathes in. He is the one in control.  
“Otto,” stammers the doctor.  
“Otto.” Anti laughs at him quietly, running his fingers down his white and struggling throat, watching the Adam’s Apple bob. “Otto… wouldn’t you do me a favor? I need you, Otto, I need your help.”  
“Fuck,” chokes the man, apparently remembering how much trouble he could be in.  
“That’s a bad word,” whispers Jameson.  
“Won’t you, Otto, won’t you help me?”  
“Of course, yes. I’m – I’m a doctor, that’s my… yes, anything you need.”  
“Good. Good.”  
He pauses to observe Otto’s trembling frame. Once the initial difficulty passes, the knowledge that he could make him do anything is better than opium.  
Anti draws his mouth close to his ear.  
“You’ll find another way to heal his throat,” growls Anti, running his fingers down his chest, tugging gently on his belt – erotic for a moment, and then terribly threatening as Anti yanks him to his chest and the cold point of a silver blade against his belly. “It’ll be your only focus. You’ll want for nothing but a cure. It will keep you awake at nights. You’ll work like a madman.”  
“Sure, yes, yes.” Otto is flushed with infatuation now, his gloved hands rising and falling, rising and falling, wanting to touch Anti, but knowing better than to try.  
“Isn’t he wise not to touch me, Jameson?” purrs Anti, digging a nail into Otto’s navel.  
“Uh-huh,” replies the child. One day he will be a little nightmare. Anti will see to it. “Shouldn’t touch Anti.”  
“He would be wise not to disappoint me,” spits Anti, shoving Otto back against the wall and letting him go. The doctor slumps to the floor, dazed and gasping, touching the place where Anti touched him with wide, blown-pupil eyes.  
“Come to me as soon as you’ve found what I ask,” says Anti, picking up Jameson and handing him his mask. The child immediately begins affixing his protection back around his face, biting his lip in his determination. “If I must visit you again, you won’t like what happens, Otto.”  
“Yes, sir, yes, I – I’ll find it immediately, as soon as I can, I’ll figure something out.”  
“And Otto?”  
“Yes, Monster,” breathes the doctor like a prayer, his eyes fogged.  
Anti opens the door. “Forget you ever saw me. If anyone else learns of it, I’ll kill them and you. It’s our little secret, you see. Wouldn’t want anyone else to get in on it, now would we?”  
“No. No. Of course not. Anything. Anything you ask.”  
And then, despite everything, despite the warnings, despite even himself –  
Otto reaches out to touch Anti’s leg, staring in astonishment at the black length of his pants, digging his fingers into his boots to find the skin of his ankles –  
Anti smashes his nose in with the heel of that blackened boot and leaves him writing on the floor of his clinic. Jameson giggles in his ear and Anti puts his child down on his shoulders.  
“All done?” asks Jameson. “No taking my throat away?”  
“Yes, your highness. Let’s go get you your strawberry ice.”  
“Bye,” says Jameson, waving at the receptionist as they pass. “Thank you for letting us come in! Have a nice day!”  
She laughs. He’s so cute. Jameson beams at her when she waves back at him, bouncing up and down as he walks. He falls asleep on his chest on the ride home. Anti puts a hand on his little ribcage, to feel his beating heart.  
This is the only person who wouldn’t say “Monster” if they could see him.  
He’ll keep him safe. He’ll make this right. He has to.

But Otto can find nothing.


	4. Four

The week passes in a haze of fury for Anti. He hasn’t felt this helpless in years, watching Jameson get more and more hungry and exhausted and afraid. He has blood often in his mouth and he cries most hours of the day, refusing to eat hardly anything, though at least he reports no more pain than a normal sore throat.  
When Otto fails him, Anti turns to other doctors. Entrances one, two, three. Returns to the second to find that her husband and children have gone to stay somewhere else in the wake of her bizarre and sudden obsession. The third has made himself ill with the stress of it, asleep against his medical books and shuddering as he nightmares. The fourth tells Anti there is nothing to be done but remove it. Anti’s blade is out before he has considered his actions; he sprays her blood across the walls and leaves her writhing through her death throes.  
What is he supposed to do? What is he supposed to do?  
He was supposed to take care of him.  
He goes back to the keep. Jameson is playing with his toy ponies. Despite his pain, he has stopped complaining. A resilient child. He taps the porcelain feet of his toys across Anti’s legs, makes them go for runs together and eat grass and kiss each other, but he no longer makes his neighing noises or makes the horses talk.  
Anti runs his fingers over his scalp, massaging gently at his skull. Jameson hands him a horse and Anti sits down to play with him in silence.  
He has a messenger sent. Otto will come back to the keep in two days time.

“Don’t let them take my voice away!”  
“Your highness – ”  
“No! No! No, I don’t want to, no, no, no, no!”  
“Child, listen to me – ”  
“Don’t let them put a knife in my throat! I don’t want them to touch me! You told me no one could touch me unless I say so! I don’t say so! No, no, no!”  
“Jameson! Stop!” Anti snatches him up at last as he sees him close to breaking the chair he’s pounding his little feet against, kicking and screaming wildly. His face is bright red with fury and terror and he’s evidently chosen to use the last day of being able to vocalize to be as loud as he possibly can.  
“No!” he wails again and again, sobbing desperately. “No, no, no!”  
“Your highness,” Anti hears himself say, clutching the child who has all but become his own. “My heart.”  
Jameson cries and cries, soaking into his shirt. Anti rocks him like an infant, pressing his body close, and he can’t stop himself from burying kisses in his hair as Jameson begins to cough again, harder now, gagging around something in his throat until a horrible wad of blood and whatever else is caught in his laryngitis comes splattering out onto Anti’s chest. Jameson’s screaming re-doubles as soon as his throat is clear again, his determined tantrum now shot through with a huge and desperate terror. He’s six years old and coughing up wads of bloody gunk, about to lose his voice forever. What else is he supposed to do? How is someone so small supposed to handle it? It’s not fair.  
It’s never fair, Anti’s head reminds him viciously. It’s never fair and you know that!  
But for whatever reason, somewhere throughout these long months, he had started believing he could force a life that has never been fair to him to be fair to Jameson.  
He curls his body tight around him and hears a sob escape his throat. Jameson is weeping softly now, kicking his legs just a little, clutching at Anti’s shirt.  
He wants to kill someone so fucking bad for this. He wants to kill everyone so fucking bad for this. There should be someone to blame. There should be someone to have revenge on. But there isn’t. There isn’t. It’s just unfair, and he can’t make it right. A great wave of despair almost sends him tilting back towards the floor. For the first time in months, he feels again the enormous desire to kill himself that he has barely survived so many times in the past, and he’s furious at everything that exists that it’s returned.  
“No,” he grits out, clutching Jameson perhaps too tightly to his heart. The child is his and no one will take him away. No one will so much as look at him without his permission. No one will have or know or love Jameson but him. “No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here and I’m going to make this right for you. I’ll be your voice, I’ll be your weapon, I’ll be your protector. Anyone who stands in your way, I’ll help you tear them apart. Do you understand?”  
Jameson sobs against his shirt, hugging what he can reach of his chest.  
“I’ll kill anyone who ever tries to hurt you. I’ll make this right for you.”  
“I don’t care about killing people! Anti, you’re so mean! I’m not going to be able to talk!” Jameson cries. “I won’t have any friends! I won’t be able to tell you when I want a sugar bun! I won’t be able to tell Betrand I love him or ask for more storytime or anything. I’ll be so quiet you’ll forget I’m there and then I’ll starve to death!”  
Anti doesn’t know why it draws a shaky laugh out of him. He strokes the back of Jameson’s head and shakes his own hurriedly, pressing their faces close together. “No, no, your highness, that will never happen, alright? I – ”  
“You have to check for me, Anti! You have to check to make sure I’m in bed and you didn’t lock me out! And you have to give me sweet buns and read me stories!”  
“I will check every single night and I will give you all the sugar your little hummingbird heart can handle and we will read so many stories together,” Anti swears. “You are mine to care for and I won’t let anything else happen to you. But you are still going to be able to talk to me, okay?”  
Jameson snuffles, exhausting himself with his tantrum, and looks up at Anti with big, teary eyes.  
“I’m still… but you said the doctor was going to take my voice away so I wouldn’t get sick?”  
“Now you must listen, because this is very important,” says Anti, leaning in conspiratorially, trying to keep Jameson from descending back into his terror. “You and I, your highness, are going to learn a secret language.”  
“A secret language?” whispers Jameson. “Just for us?”  
“Yes. A few other people will speak it if they can see us, but you don’t even have to be able to talk to speak this language. And you and I will learn it and we’ll be able to talk to each other and no one else will be able to hear us. You won’t need your voice at all.”  
“Will I be able to do it once the doctor takes my voice away?”  
“You can do it right now. We just have to start learning. I’m going to get a tutor and we’ll learn it really quickly, so there will only be a couple weeks where you will have to write to talk to me.”  
“How do I do it?”  
“You have to use your hands,” he says, and he reaches down to spread open the little fingers against his own palm. “The way you move your hands is like saying a word. Should I show you?”  
Sitting up straighter on his lap and staring intensely at his hands, Jameson nods.  
“What’s your favorite animal, your highness?”  
“Pony. Like Bertrand.”  
“What do you do with your hands when you ride Bertrand?”  
“I… hold onto him?”  
“Onto the horn on his saddle, right? Like this?” Anti holds out two fists in front of him like he’s gripping something between them. “And then we go bump, bump, bump.”  
He rocks his body like they’re on a horse and Jameson mimics his hands like he’s holding on, giggling a little at the game.  
“Good job. Good. So when you hold out your hands like that and you rock them back and forth like we’re on Bertrand, I’ll know the word you want to say is horse.”  
“Horse,” repeats Jameson in a reverent whisper, moving his hands back and forth. “But I want to say pony.”  
“Well, maybe you can say little horse.”  
“What’s little?”  
“That’s what our tutor’s going to teach us. All the words we don’t know.”  
“I don’t want more classes, though, Anti…”  
Anti chuckles and rubs his back, soothing his wrinkled shirt. “Tell you what. If you’re good for the doctor, I will cancel all your other classes until we can talk to each other again and you feel much better.”  
“Really?”  
“Yes, your highness.”  
“No more geography?”  
“Let the rest of the world rot. It’ll just be you and me.”  
“You and me. You won’t go away on any business trips.”  
“No.”  
“You won’t make us go sailing for months again.”  
“We’ll stay right here at home.”  
“Or bring any mean men to the house and make me hide upstairs.”  
“Not one.”  
“Hmm.” Jameson lies his head sleepily down against his shoulder, letting Anti start rocking him again, running his fingers over his shirt. “That will be pretty good.”  
“Yes,” murmurs Anti, hoping to rock him to sleep. For a long time, they sit together there on the floor of their little castle and they hold each other close.  
“I’m still really scared, Anti,” Jameson whispers.  
“It’s okay to be scared.”  
“Really?”  
“Yes, your highness.”  
“You get scared, Anti?”  
“I was scared when I was your age very often.”  
“Oh. Will I be braver when I’m older?”  
“Yes. I promise. I’ll show you how. I will show you how to stop anybody from hurting you, and then there will be nothing to be afraid of.”  
Except, apparently, sudden growths in the throats of small children. Anti sighs and sets his chin on Jameson’s head.  
“I’m never going to sing again,” says Jameson. “I want to sing my mommy’s songs.”  
Anti closes his eyes.  
He knows, in that moment, that he’s a liar.  
It’s not a coincidence. It’s not a side effect. It’s not affection for a pet or an ally or a cute little boy who means nothing to him.  
He’s attached to Jameson. Fully and truly. He loves Jameson. And he hears it become true in the next words that he gives his heart over to, words he never thought he would say.  
“I’ll sing them for you,” he promises.  
Jameson pauses, looking up at him, his fingers scratching at his beard, so warm and so gentle. “But you don’t know mommy’s songs, Anti.”  
“I do,” he says. “She was my mommy too.”  
Jameson stops for a moment and then giggles, shaking his head. “Anti. No. My mommy is big with dark hair and she likes to ride horses with me. We have different mommys because you’re old.”  
Anti can’t help but laugh. “I’m fourteen years older than you. Your mother had me when she was twenty-four.”  
“Anti, you’re teasing me again.”  
“Not this time, your highness.”  
“No, you’re teasing me,” insists Jameson, waggling a reprimanding finger in his face. “Prove it!”  
“Don’t I talk like your mother?” asks Anti softly, overwhelmed by a feeling of fondness for him, as he is more and more often lately. “My accent?”  
Jameson stares up at him, frowning.  
“Don’t you have a big sister who has the same mother as you, but a different father?”  
Jameson’s eyes widen.  
Anti closes his eyes and breathes out a long sigh.  
If you asked him, he wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly why he never told Jameson they were brothers. Shame, maybe, of the family he came from. He supposes, in some way, Jameson shatters the belief he had that nothing good could ever come of his family, but, then again, he still can’t help but believe that Jameson will grow to be as evil a person as their parents and their uncle and their sister.  
If he really had to put words to it, he might say that he didn’t want that old family anymore. What he wanted was Jameson. What he wanted was a new family, all his own. The blood between them does not matter.  
The love between them does.  
Anti leans in very close and begins to sing their mother’s lullabies to him.  
“Absalom?” asks Jameson.  
He must have heard, at some point or another, the horrible secret of his mother’s missing child. He must have heard that name that Anti has not been called for years and years and years.  
“Yes, Jameson,” he whispers. “I’m Absalom.”  
“I love you,” he says, like nothing has changed. “I love you.”  
The warmth of his body. The feeling of his fingers in his beard. Soft eyes looking up at him. Safety. Trust. Family.  
“I love you too, Jameson.”  
He doesn’t know when it became true.  
You’ll break my heart one day, he thinks to himself. But I love you.  
He sings his little brother to sleep.

Jameson stares up at him, red-eyed, his mouth hanging slightly open.  
“Don’t try to speak,” whispers Anti, stroking his hair.  
But Jameson does.  
Tiny, rasping wheezes rise and fall in his chest. Tears grow and shudder down his face. His poor swollen tongue flickers in his mouth.  
“Sh, baby, sh.” Anti curls closer around him, touching his chest tenderly. “The medicine is what’s making you feel so foggy. Everything will be okay. Everything went well. I’m right here.”  
Jameson’s fingers reach up to brush through his beard. Anti kisses his thumb. After all, he will only be so tiny for so long. One day, maybe sooner than Anti thinks, he will be gone, and despite the loss of his voice that day, Jameson will find his own words.  
Not everyone wants the things that Anti wants. Not everything is violence. Not everything is hatred and revenge, my brother. I don’t think I want to be a soldier. I think I want to be at peace. Not everything is unfair.  
Some moments – some months – are just recovery and care and the love between them, the love like a promise between them, the first thing in years that has made Anti wonder: Maybe there is a point to all of this. Maybe he’s it. Jameson’s fingers scratch his beard. Anti leans into his palm and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know why I love this AU so much - it's usually everything I would hate in a fic lol. so how come I'm obsessed with it? I'm working on two other pieces related to this universe, both incorporating the other characters we have yet to see. Thanks for reading.


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